Malkin: Waste from first lady's healthy lunch program is indigestive

The road to gastric hell is paved with first lady Michelle Obama’s Nanny State intentions. Don’t take my word for it. School kids in Los Angeles have blown the whistle on the east wing chef-in-chief’s healthy lunch diktats. Get your Pepto Bismol ready. The taste of government waste is indigestion-inducing.

According to a weekend report by the Los Angeles Times, the city’s “trailblazing introduction of healthful school lunches has been a flop.” In response to the public hectoring and financial inducement of Mrs. Obama’s federally subsidized anti-obesity campaign, the district dropped chicken nuggets, corn dogs and flavored milk from the menu for “beef jambalaya, vegetable curry, pad Thai, lentil and brown rice cutlets, and quinoa and black-eyed pea salads.”

Sounds delectable in theory. But in practice, the initiative has been what L.A. Unified’s food services director Dennis Barrett plainly concludes is a “disaster.” While the Obama administration has showered the nation’s second-largest school district with nutrition awards, thousands of students voted with their upset tummies and abandoned the program. A forbidden-food black market — stoked not just by students, but also by teachers — is now thriving. Moreover, “(p)rincipals report massive waste, with unopened milk cartons and uneaten entrees being thrown away.”

This despite a massive increase in spending on nutritional improvements — from $2 million to $20 million alone in the last five years on fresh produce.

This despite a nearly half-billion-dollar budget shortfall and 3,000 layoffs earlier this year.

Earlier this spring, L.A. school officials acknowledged that the sprawling district is left with a whopping 21,000 uneaten meals a day, in part because the federal school lunch program “sometimes requires more food to be served than a child wants to eat.” The leftovers will now be donated to nonprofit agencies. But after the recipients hear about students’ reports of moldy noodles, undercooked meat and hard rice, one wonders how much of the “free” food will go down the hatch — or down the drain. Ahhh, savor the flavor of one-size-fits-all mandates.

There’s nothing wrong with encouraging our children to eat healthier, of course. There’s nothing wrong with well-run, locally based and parent-driven efforts. But as I’ve noted before, the federal foodie cops care much less about students’ waistlines than they do about boosting government and public union payrolls.

In a little-noticed announcement several months ago, Obama health officials declared their intention to use school lunch applications to boost government health care rolls. Never mind the privacy concerns of parents.

Big Government programs “for the children” are never about the children. If they were, you wouldn’t see Chicago public school officials banning students from bringing home-packed meals made by their own parents. In April, The Chicago Tribune reported that “unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.” The bottom line? Banning homemade lunches means a fatter payday for the school and its food provider.

Remember: The unwritten mantra driving Mrs. Obama’s federal school lunch meddling and expansion is: “Cede the children, feed the state.” And the biggest beneficiaries of her efforts over the past three years have been her husband’s deep-pocketed pals at the Service Employees International Union. There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren. SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more at all costs.

In L.A., the district’s cafeteria fund is $20 million in the hole thanks to political finagling by SEIU Local 99. The union’s left-wing allies on the school board and in the mayor’s office pressured the district to adopt reckless fiscal policies awarding gold-plated health benefits to part-time cafeteria workers in the name of “social justice.” As one school board member who opposed the budget-busting entitlements said: “Everyone in this country deserves health benefits. But it was a very expensive proposal. And it wasn’t done at the bargaining table, which is where health benefits are usually negotiated. And no one had any idea where the money was going to come from.”

Early next year, Mrs. Obama will use the “success” of her child nutrition campaign to hawk a new tome and lobby for more money and power in concert with her husband’s re-election campaign. It’s a recipe for more half-baked progressivism served with a side order of bitter arugula.

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This foreign woman writing today has a really twisted mind. If the First Lady were to WALK ACROSS THE POTOMAC, right on top of the water, Malkin would say "how could we have such a stupid FIrst Lady that she CAN'T EVEN SWIM."

Here is the deal. If your kid goes to LISD they get a free breakfast. However, the catch is that each child must get all four items, if not they must pay for the meal. Most kids do not want all items or will not eat all items. So to avoid the problem all kids are told to get all items and throw away what they do not want. This is wrong in so many ways. First, it teaches our kids to waste food. Second, it teaches them handouts are okay and to use only what you need and throw away the rest. Third, it teaches them to depend on the government. This is a great example of Obamacare, feed the kids so we can feed the unions. Who cares if we waste food, the kids will learn to depend on us. This is typical liberal democrat let's be led into socialism thinking. I would think that any reasonable person would realize that this food program is wrong. The excess food could be donated to the needy. My kids just started back to school for spring semester and I was told that the schools were going to let the kids choose the items they want. I am glad to see the food waste will be reduced and I hope other school systems will follow suit.